> That means, counterintuitively, that kids who are good at math should be spending less time on math, not more.
Maybe it's the right thing to do, but you're not going to get a lot of support for letting the kids who are good at school go home after an hour. All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class. Might as well try to have something for them to do other than throw paper airplanes after ten minutes and distract the kids who need the whole hour.
Anyway, I suggested 2x the pupils for the fast math class, so that the normal math class got more resources. If you've got smaller schools, it's harder to allocate resources, and that's understandable, but a lot of schools have enough kids to push the ratios around to get more attention to the kids that need it.
It's unnecessary for all high school graduates to have taken AP Calc; but it's a waste of students' time for those who could have made it through that not to have had the opportunity. Just like it's a waste of students' time for them to be in classes that are beyond their current level so much that they can't catch up and then just passing them because there's no alternative, so they just zone out. Admittedly, the daycare function of school doesn't really care about wasting students' time, but that's only part of the function of school.
All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class
But why? This is a very dysfunctional way of allocating teaching time, especially if the classes are not split along learning ability. What ages are we talking about here?
At my school, we didn't even get subject-specific time slots until 13/14 years: before that, we all spent the same time in class but everyone worked on their own subject. The teacher's job was to make sure that every child spent time on each subject according to their needs, not according to alotted time.
And after that, when we did get separate classes and separate teachers for the different subjects, only 70% of our school time was scheduled for the whole class; the other 30% was for teacher "open hours": the students were expected to fill that time according to their own needs.
Maybe it's the right thing to do, but you're not going to get a lot of support for letting the kids who are good at school go home after an hour. All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class. Might as well try to have something for them to do other than throw paper airplanes after ten minutes and distract the kids who need the whole hour.
Anyway, I suggested 2x the pupils for the fast math class, so that the normal math class got more resources. If you've got smaller schools, it's harder to allocate resources, and that's understandable, but a lot of schools have enough kids to push the ratios around to get more attention to the kids that need it.
It's unnecessary for all high school graduates to have taken AP Calc; but it's a waste of students' time for those who could have made it through that not to have had the opportunity. Just like it's a waste of students' time for them to be in classes that are beyond their current level so much that they can't catch up and then just passing them because there's no alternative, so they just zone out. Admittedly, the daycare function of school doesn't really care about wasting students' time, but that's only part of the function of school.